They said, in their initial interviews, before EA even came out, that they were excited to be making Baldur's Gate 3, that they would be making it using the fifth edition of the dungeons and dragons ruleset, which they were going to be implementing as faithfully as possible. Those were the original advertising comments made. Those comments were weakened and backtracked very hard after EA launched. This is not a shared hallucination - this happened. No, I can't provide quoted interviews - they've disappeared.
It may well be that those initial comments were made indelicately, and were not, exactly, intended to deceive... but they were nevertheless not indicative of their actual intention and so people who came to the game excited and invested in it, based on those comments, got very upset when it became clear that those initial comments were not actually reflective of what they were doing at all.
